Guest column: Personal responsibility is the best remedy for careless, negligent driving

Back in the stone age year of 1964, I took drivers education at Dickinson School. It was a summer program, and I still count my instructor, J.E. Adams, Jr. as one of the most thorough and dedicated teachers throughout my educational life.

He stressed what likely would be branded overcautious driving “behaviors”; the salient point was it was the behaviors, not just the skills, over which the driver ultimately has the most control.

He stressed the need to be aware of what is happening five or more cars ahead and not just the one in front of you. Be aware of pedestrians on the sidewalk and not just in the street. Take extra caution in parking lots and downtown business areas where people tend to suddenly open car doors or appear from around a parked vehicle because they are concentrating on what they are about to do, not what they are actually doing at that time.

Years and decades later, as a school teacher myself, I cringed that drivers ed graduates did not know that at a stoplight, if you can’t see the rear wheels of the car preceding you, you’re too close (STOP = See Tires On Pavement).

Mr. Adams also seemed to have a personal disfavor about people who slow down or even stop on an expressway ramp because they are unsure or uncommitted about oncoming traffic; it was drummed into us that an onramp is correctly called an “acceleration lane,” and it is your responsibility to read and seamlessly blend into the expressway traffic.

This is my bane as well, having totaled a perfectly good Nissan Sentra when a young lady on a phone suddenly stopped on the rain-slicked entrance to Westbound I-196 at Fuller Avenue.

But perhaps the most salient point Mr. Adams consistently drove home to me was the fact that personal responsibility for driving attitude has not only moral force but force of law. Section 257.62b of the Michigan Vehicle Code cites careless or negligent operation of a vehicle as a civil infraction.

It is a short and succinct little section, and its entirety is as follows, “A person who operates a vehicle upon a highway or a public frozen lake, stream, or pond or other place open to the general public including an area designated for the parking of vehicles in a careless or negligent manner likely to endanger any person or property, but without wantonness or recklessness, is responsible for a civil infraction."

I stress the key words as being “careless,” “negligent,” “likely to endanger,” and “without wantonness or recklessness.” Notice that persons or properties do not need to be harmed or even endangered; they just need to have been put into a position where they are likely to be. The driver does not need to be proven to be crazed or aggressive but just careless or negligent; not taking due caution for the situation.

The driver neither need be wanton (intentional), nor reckless (overtly mis-operating the car), but only distracted or incautious. This section is abundantly clear regarding its intent; when you are driving, you cannot do anything else which takes away any part of your full concentration on traffic, pedestrians or the road.

This would certainly include applying makeup, shaving, talking on any phone, hands-free or otherwise, reading, and certainly texting. I will bet my bottom dollar that Mr. Adams would be in full agreement on this.

I hear contrarians and anti-seatbelt, free choice people asking, “Well, then what about radios, cigarettes, coffee cups, etc., etc.?"

Those behaviors are basically second nature in our society, like locking your car when you park or turning off the light when you leave the bathroom. People just do those things without need for deep, decision-making concentration; an entirely different scenario than social interacting with far off friends, arguing with a recalcitrant client or arranging an agenda for this afternoon’s staff meeting.

Careless and negligent driving is on the books and has been since 1949. It has been amended a couple of times but never rescinded.

Texting while driving has been a de-facto civil offense since before it was even conceptualized. If Michigan’s new law specifically targeting this deadly high-tech habit causes texters to stop it, then lives and property will certainly be saved.

But if drivers simply put every aspect of their driving habits under a bit more critical scrutiny, more of us would, as was emblazoned boldly on Mr. Adams’s blackboard, “Arrive Alive!”

---David G. Marin is a retired school teacher. He lives near Cedar Springs.

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